Email inbox

The problem

Requests arrive in a shared support mailbox. Two people answer the same one, a third is forgotten, and when the client replies a week later nobody remembers the context. Forwarding mail into a ticket tool loses the thread, and replying from the tool arrives from a strange address.

How SAQ solves it

Email is a channel into the same tickets, not a separate helpdesk. SAQ reads your mailbox, turns new mail into tickets in a shared Inbox, matches replies to existing tickets, and sends comments out from your own mailbox so the conversation continues where the client started it.

What you get

Mailbox connection

Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Graph, with a setup guide that limits the app's access to the one mailbox and a connection test that proves it cannot read any other mailbox. Or IMAP and SMTP for other hosts. Credentials are encrypted at rest.

Shared Inbox

Untriaged mail as tickets. Any workspace user sets the project, kind, assignee, and billing client and routes it. The sender becomes a contact, or is matched to an existing client user, and follows the ticket.

Threading

Replies are matched on message ids first, then on the ticket id in the subject. A reply within the reopen window (14 days by default) reopens a closed ticket; a later reply becomes a new ticket linked to the old one.

Outbound from your address

Shared comments go to the client, internal comments to your team and elevated client users, staff comments to your team only, all from the workspace mailbox. Recipients are re-checked at send time.

Restricted review

A reply that quotes an internal or staff thread, or whose sender cannot be verified, never lands in the shared Inbox. It waits in a queue only readers of that audience can open, with neither title nor body visible to others.

Protection

Auto-reply detection, loop guard, sender verification from DMARC results, HTML sanitizing with remote images blocked, attachments quarantined and checked.

Timesheet delivery

Client timesheets are sent from the same mailbox to designated recipients, never as ticket comments.

Key benefits

• Nothing in the mailbox is forgotten or answered twice
• The client keeps one email conversation and sees one ticket
• Internal discussion in the same ticket, never sent to the client
• No change to the client's habits: they email as before
• Access can be scoped to exactly one mailbox

Typical use cases

• Support address. support@ is connected. New mail is triaged from the Inbox into the Support project, answered, and closed. Time logged on the ticket bills against the client's retainer.
• Client project manager who prefers email. They reply to notification emails; their replies land on the ticket as shared comments and notify the assignee.
• A forwarded thread. A stranger replies to a forwarded notification. The reply becomes a separate Inbox ticket linked to the original, without access to it, until someone on the team merges it.

Why this is simpler

Because email is a door onto the same ticket, there is no synchronization between a helpdesk and a project tool, and no second inbox to watch. The rules for who sees what are the same in mail as in the app.

The Microsoft 365 path is implemented and tested against Microsoft's API in SAQ's own test suite. Before your workspace goes live, we verify it against your tenant as part of setup.